Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Those who don't want the world to have more kids don't have their own

One of those fun troll roles to play involves telling secular leftists that irreligious Darwin lovers exhibit the least Darwinian fitness and telling pious creationists that they are winning the Darwinian race. While liberal atheists and agnostics aged 40+ average 1.78 kids, firmly theistic conservatives in the same age range average 2.69.

I suspected when it came to worries about overpopulation, however, stated beliefs would be far more aligned with actual behavior than in the case of evolution by means of natural selection. Expressed concerns about sustainability and the like aside, people who would see it as just rewards if homo sapiens go extinct in the next century hail more frequently from the ranks of those who think the human population needs to be reduced than from among those who want humanity to be fruitful and multiply.

Indeed, the GSS shows that tends to be the case. The following table (n = 1,520) displays the percentage of people aged 40+ who agree with the Malthusian concern that "the earth cannot continue to support population growth at its present rate" by the number of children they have:

Kids

Agree

0

65.6%

1

60.0%

2

54.5%

3

45.9%

4

46.6%

5+

52.7%

But maybe I'm following the wrong scent in my hunt for hypocrisy. If the rapture occurs in the near future and only those judged unworthy of heavenly entry are left behind to expire, the fulfillment of prophecy will have happily occurred and the result will be one in which the earth certainly will no longer be able to sustain it's current growth rate, yet you'd be correct to think that most believers ignore this when they fail to express concern about indefinite population growth in the future!

The following table (n = 2,392) reveals their hypocrisy by showing the percentage of people who don't think the earth can sustain current levels of human population growth by confidence in God's existence:

7 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Atheists and agnostics usually replace their religious centered view with the scientific method or Gaia worship. So plenty of these types believe in global warming and all that jazz about Earth having finite resources, hence makes sense that at a certain level this system will collapse.

The only question is eventually will the world be only Chinese, Indian and Hispanic?

Giant groups like the Indians will probably be with us for quite some time. Suppose their birth rate somehow plunged to 1.5 births per woman (it is a still-massive 2.7 right now).

It would have to stay at that low birthrate continuously for 20 generations or 500/600 years in order for their population to be like present day Ireland.

If India's TFR only plunged to 1.8 and stayed there for 500/600 years, it would still have the population of present day Mexico after that time.

Germany on the other hand is currently on trend to have a population the size of a medium city in 350 years, going from 80 million to 800 K. Surely that must reverse right? Right?

It seems like Malthusian conditions will intervene to disrupt unsustainable trends on the high side, as they are doing in many African nations presently.

It also seems that a return of patriarchy in the West is inevitable since high-earning men are partnering with lower-earning women while low earning men and high-earning women go childless. This has got to be increasing sexual dimorphism.

I honestly think nations like Japan and Germany eventually have higher TFR again.

Japan and Germany are crowded places and both nations tried to get more land in WWII. They were pretty successful too, except that the world community had suddenly decided that wars of expansion were no longer kosher, as they had been for the previous many millenia.

Eventually I imagine that there gets to be more space inside the borders of those countries and trends reverse. After all, nations such as Ireland, France and Scandinavia that have enough space continue to replace themselves. France is only half as densely populated as Germany.

"Japan and Germany are crowded places and both nations tried to get more land in WWII. They were pretty successful too, except that the world community had suddenly decided that wars of expansion were no longer kosher, as they had been for the previous many millenia."

Um, I am pretty sure that people always resisted takeovers. Anyway if Germany had taken say, Angola and exterminated them instead of the Jews, I doubt the Brits, Americans and Russians would have been willing to die trying to stop them. Hell, the Americans didn't even want to get involved till Pearl Harbor. 1940 was only about 80 years after the death of the last man and woman of Tasmania. Same for Japan. If they had quit while they were ahead, they probably could have held much of their conquered territory.